


The Real Boy -- A Fairytale

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood, Other, also just kind of a creepy ghosty demon stalker situation, but people totally die, idk how graphic it is, imaginary friends or something, kind of, people die, twisted palemance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-08
Updated: 2013-11-08
Packaged: 2017-12-31 20:09:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1035880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Later, Karkat would realize he didn’t know when it had started, when this boy – his age, never older, never taller – first formed in the darkness.  Perhaps he was a friendly bogeyman; perhaps he was a ghost.  Gamzee always built himself a quick skin out of shadow when he came to play.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Real Boy -- A Fairytale

Later, Karkat would realize he didn’t know when it had started, when this boy – his age, never older, never taller – first formed in the darkness. Perhaps he was a friendly bogeyman; perhaps he was a ghost. Gamzee always built himself a quick skin out of shadow when he came to play.  


The shade cast by a tree, for instance, the ordinary old two-dimensional shade could wiggle free of gravity and become smoke, then become him, with his long, brittle arms (like toothpicks, like plucked bones) and his mop of matted hair. His skin seemed to swirl if you looked at him too long, the shadow inside churning and never quite solid, though he seemed real enough to touch. His eyes were like puddles of purple ink, and when he smiled his teeth were long and curled and bright as stars.  


Karkat couldn’t remember him ever saying his name was Gamzee, now that he thought about it. He’d just always known, somehow. His brother, Kankri, was going to be a priest. He said everyone must beware the demons that prowled their earth, prying open human ears to whisper their blasphemies inside, their tricks and unkind possibilities. Misleading us, misleading us all. Kankri said to be careful, to do the sign of the cross if you’re scared, to kneel down by the bed to pray before tucking yourself in at night. Pray before turning out your lamp, he said. Karkat, what’s the matter? You look so pale.  


Kankri said so many things – don’t offend, don’t step beyond yourself, don’t push yourself on others, don’t yell, don’t stomp, don’t hit, don’t –  


Gamzee and Karkat played in the sandbox. They built little kingdoms, and Gamzee found charming shells – spirals, always spirals, which he called miracles because they meant infinity or something – and slabs of sea-glass to make heads for the people who lived there. Karkat made princesses who found their princes, or found other princesses. He narrated their adventures solemnly; even the funny parts were so carefully thought out. He even clicked the people’s faces together when he wanted them to kiss. Gamzee cried, sometimes, when the stories were especially good, but he said his tears were poison. Karkat thought perhaps that was just the way with imaginary friends. He must have imagined Gamzee that way, at one point or another.  


Or perhaps he hadn’t.  


Either way, he never touched the tears. Pretend or otherwise, Gamzee said they could scorch his skin clean off.  


Gamzee and Karkat played on the swings. Sometimes when Karkat pushed Gamzee too high, he seemed to disappear in the sun, wavering like a trick of the light. Sometimes when Gamzee pushed Karkat too high, he would tumble off and scrape himself; he would bleed into the playground sand. He’d get grit in his cuts and Gamzee would stare, say that it would be alright over and over. Karkat called him stupid a lot; he called him an idiot and a terrible person for just watching while people got hurt. Gamzee would always spread his hands and say he was sorry, ask how he could change.  


Karkat started to tell him ways, but the changes happened slowly.  


One day, Gamzee came in with actual human skin, the kind with pores and hairs growing out of it, with blood underneath. One day he came in with fingernails, and then he had a nose. Karkat would always say he was getting better, but maybe there was still some work to be done. Gamzee would say, yeah, brother, yeah, and soak every word in when Karkat told him about toes and tears made of water.  


Karkat told Gamzee to sit up straight when the teacher spoke to him – Karkat pretended to be the teacher and Gamzee sat up straight. Karkat told him to say “Please” and “Thank you.” He told him to love his friends and try his best on his homework. Gamzee said he didn’t ever get homework, and Karkat asked why. He never got an answer, not ever, not before it was too late.  


Gamzee and Karkat played together in Karkat’s dreams. At first he only popped in sometimes, when the dreams got extra scary – all of a sudden there he would be, standing with a little smile that made no sense. Was he happy things were frightening? Was he there to chase the monsters away? Karkat never knew. They would create impossible worlds in those dreams, far away nothings built of circus tents and carbonated, candy-colored rivers. People would call out to Karkat in dreamland, telling him to be careful, telling him to run away. Gamzee would always drag him back in, so they’d fly, they’d go deeper than the deepest parts of other-world oceans, they’d plant pennies and watch cities spring up like weeds.  


By the time Karkat told Gamzee he was too old for imaginary friends, Gamzee looked like an ordinary human boy – no taller than Karkat, no handsomer, not even a single day older – and he was appearing in every single one of his dreams.  


There was no reason someone had to outgrow a friend, Gamzee said. There was no goddamn fucking motherfucking reason someone had to outgrow a fucking friend motherfucker.  


Karkat said goodbye. He said not to follow him to class anymore, not to slink between cracks in the brickwork or watch from the contours of other people’s faces.  
Gamzee’s own face was human now, and his tears weren’t poison, anymore. Karkat gave him a hug, and he went limp against him, limp like a puppet once you stop pulling the strings. What’s my purpose then, brother? He asked. What am I all supposed to be?  


Karkat told him he would figure it out.  


Time passed.  


It wasn’t that Karkat didn’t see Gamzee again in that time, all that time that passed normally, passively, frightfully, as time always does. He did see him, sometimes, but only watching him in his dreams. Gamzee’s eyes were back to being pools of empty ink on a human face and his teeth were curling, growing brighter until someday they would blaze again like stars.  


Karkat was in college when it happened. He was a young man with stuffy long-sleeved grey shirts that hid the freckles on his arms. He was carrying a backpack home from class; it had a wallet in it, with credit cards that the big men wanted. They came from the alley, where rust had eaten away at the metal gratings and the vines slithering up the sides of buildings were brittle and dead. They came with their faces twisted up and knives clenched in their sweaty fingers. They were someone’s children, Karkat knew.  


Kankri said be careful, but Kankri also said be kind. Karkat hesitated too long before kicking the big man in the crotch, and he was hit down on the street. The men reached into his bag and took what they wanted, and then they kicked his gut. They kicked his head. They talked, and he screamed, and he remembered too late that Kankri had also told him to kneel down by his bed every night and pray. There are some things colder than humankind, some things more patient, some things that wait and watch.  


Gamzee came from the shadows, then, like he used to in the long-ago. He rose from the shade cast by a big man’s aching back. He rose and his fingers were spindly-long, long as arms and with too many joints; his smile was stretched back as if the non-skin had been pinned up by his ears. He had no ears. There was stardust smeared across his face, like he consumed suns and they had turned to black holes inside him. Too late Karkat saw that there were bloody fingerprints mixed in with the liquid shadow of him, plastered on what would have been his skin; there were words painted across his forehead, his chest, his back. He was Karkat’s age, now, or older, or ancient. Not a day younger than forever, or at least as long as there have been shadows to cast.  


He killed them, each and every one of the big men. He tore them to ragged pieces, and he laughed. He plucked out their eyes and cut off their heads. He gathered them up by their hair and swung them like some children swing purses or pretty dolls.  


Karkat passed out –  


—And there was Gamzee in his dream, slathering the walls with blood from inside the big men, scrawling messages and warnings. He wrote – I am the gods. He wrote – Motherfucking blasphemers done me wrong.  


Karkat thought of playing in the sandbox, narrating romantic stories and watching his friend blubber like a big baby. He thought of pushing Gamzee on the swings and the way he cackled, the way he guffawed so wildly, so madly that it would have split open any human ribcage and spilled him out all over the ground.  


Gamzee said, “I saved you, brother,” and his voice was just how it had been before. Older, maybe.  


“You monster,” Karkat said. Gamzee’s skin seethed and swirled, galaxies in shadow, a hundred thousand dizzy Milky Ways mixing themselves into dust. Gamzee spread his hands, glinting with blood by the light of the streetlamp, a question on his lips. Karkat could barely look at him. “You can’t be real.”


End file.
